The Engagement Present, Part I.

I have been working on a top secret engagement present for my sister for the past three weeks. She finally received it yesterday, so now I can talk about it! Take a look:

Both the piped pillow and the frame (remember the painted frame from an earlier post? This is it, in its intended purpose!!) are silkscreened with a silhouette of Lissa and Greg. Making the silhouette was a bit more complicated than I anticipated. For starters, I requested a picture of them standing side by side. However, being as they are in the throws of new love, the picture I received is of them hugging. Not so good for my purposes. My brilliant Miles suggested I print out two copies of the picture, then cut out each person individually; then, once I had a piece of each, I put them together with a little space between each, so you can see their individual selves, and taped them to a separate piece of paper. Then, I traced around the new silhouette, cut it out, and used that cut out as a stencil.

Simple, right? Au contraire.



I placed the stencil under my screen so that when I flooded the screen with ink, the stencil would stick, and their silhouette would be on the paper/fabric beneath. For some reason that eluded me at the time, the image kept bleeding. It either made Lissa wider than she is tall or gave Greg a Fraggle head.

(Look at Whitey Ford, being helpful and getting his long fur in my paint. He's being equally helpful as I type this, rubbing his furry self all over my computer and laying across my hands so I can't type. Love him.)

In retrospect, I realized that I was probably either a) pushing the ink through too hard, or b) forcing ink under the stencil when I dragged the squeegee two ways (forward and back). But at this point I was incredibly frustrated and decided to turn to my Yudu screenprinting machine instead. Yudu emulsion sheets are fairly expensive, so if I could have used a plain screen and a stencil, I would have preferred the economy of that, but at this point, I was desperate.

So, I made up my screen with emulsion, exposed the image of the happy couple, and went from there. Ta da! (nearly) instant success.

I was originally going to use scraps of red and gold fabric for the back of the pillow, but while I had the Yudu out, I got a little ink-happy and went ahead and silkscreened a bird silhouette on the same natural colored muslin I used for the front. I love birds, which everyone probably knows by now, and I thought that it was a surprising counterpart to the front. Here's a look at the fabrics when I was finished printing them:

And here is a close-up of the framed print:

I love that. Since Lissa and Greg are getting married in July, with an outdoor reception in the swamps of South Carolina, I thought this would be a cool image to put on fans to hand out at the cocktail hour! Making a prototype of that is next on my list of craft-to-do's. To be continued!